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SPLUNK FOR DEVELOPERS: VISIBILITY AS YOU DEVELOP

Limited Visibility Slows App Development
It’s all-too-familiar - you work all night to finish a web application that absolutely, positively, must go live by the next morning. You test it in your development environment and everything works great. Then, when you push it live, it runs fine for a few minutes, hours ... and then the call comes in. As you proceed to figure out where the bottleneck is, you discover more problems lurking. Finally, after a manual investigation and countless hours, you discover race conditions that impact performance under certain specific conditions.

It’s a frustrating, laborious process; you eventually manage to track down all the bugs and fix them, only to find that the app, while no longer breaking, still isn't functioning optimally. At this point, you are under pressure to push the app back into production. So you declare victory, patch the known issues and hope for the best. Time passes and the call comes in again - the transaction is taking too long to complete. After a manual investigation and countless hours you discover a large number of failed transactions.

How much revenue did you miss by not fixing these sooner? How could you possibly calculate that? How do you gain more visibility into your apps as you develop them, and how do you mine your app's exhaust (log data, metrics, stats) for better operational visibility?

The Solution: Splunk
Splunk is an engine for indexing and searching IT data with a sophisticated search language and statistical analysis capabilities. Splunk gives you visibility into your apps as you develop them, before that call comes in. Quickly find and debug errors, monitor and analyze performance, track transactions, and build intelligence right into your app. Here are a few things developers do with Splunk:

Build Statistical Analysis into Apps
Suppose you're building an app for your IT department, and you need to analyze events generated when users log into your network. Or you're building an app for a telecommunications company, and you need to be able to identify and analyze usage patterns and transactions. By building intelligence into your logs and using Splunk, you can report on any type of event and perform any kind of pattern detection or transaction analysis. Incorporating key value pairs
into the log data rapidly enables metrics and visualizations in Splunk.

Find and Isolate Performance Problems in Code
Splunk started as a log analyzer for IT operations - log at verbose levels and then “splunk” the logs to profile application performance and detect errors and
bugs to meet SLA's after deployment.

Record and Analyze Events: ‘Semantic Logging’
Record events in logs and build intelligence into applications to extract and analyze business-level metrics like transaction volumes, user behavior patterns
and average customer response times.

Deploy and Manage Apps
Perform real-time statistical analysis to detect anomalies in your code performance and measure the impact of code changes to the application over time. Use Splunk to profile and fine tune application performance regardless of platform, including Java, .NET, PHP, or Ruby on Rails, as well as back-end database technologies, message buses and legacy technologies.

Build Security into Custom Applications
Security teams typically struggle responding to application-level attacks. This is due to a lack of context provided by the log data as a reaction to the attack. During the QA process for business critical applications, penetration testing is often included as part of the QA cycle. Application responses to common attacks based on the “OWASP Top 10 Standard” can be monitored by Splunk during the QA cycle. Reactions to each type of attack can be added as an artifact in the log data for improved identification and faster response.

Analytics for Free with Simple Logging
Technologies that simply index all logs without being bound to any particular format, schema or instrumentation are the most effective because you spend less effort implementing them. Putting a little thought into your log format as you code can help deliver valuable clues to troubleshoot and optimize performance of your applications. Splunk let’s you accelerate application development without spending hours troubleshooting by manually grepping through your logs.

Contact Atomic Data and find out more about what Splunk can do for your development team. 1-800-285-5179